Dylan Thomas - Collected Poems

Classic Poetry Series

Dylan Thomas

- poems -

Publication Date:

2004

Publisher:

PoemHunter.Com - The World's Poetry Archive

http://www.PoemHunter.com

www.PoemHunter.com - The World's Poetry Archive 2

A Child's Christmas in Wales

One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town cornernow and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear amoment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days andsix nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nightswhen I was six.

All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlongmoon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of theice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring outwhatever I can find. In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidaysresting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs. Prothero and thefiremen.

It was on the afternoon of the Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs. Prothero's garden,waiting for cats, with her son Jim. It was snowing. It was always snowing at Christmas.December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers. Butthere were cats. Patient, cold and callous, our hands wrapped in socks, we waited tosnowball the cats. Sleek and long as jaguars and horrible-whiskered, spitting andsnarling, they would slink and sidle over the white back-garden walls, and thelynx-eyed hunters, Jim and I, fur-capped and moccasined trappers from Hudson Bay,off Mumbles Road, would hurl our deadly snowballs at the green of their eyes. The wisecats never appeared.

We were so still, Eskimo-footed arctic marksmen in the muffling silence of the eternalsnows - eternal, ever since Wednesday - that we never heard Mrs. Prothero's first cryfrom her igloo at the bottom of the garden. Or, if we heard it at all, it was, to us, likethe far-off challenge of our enemy and prey, the neighbor's polar cat. But soon thevoice grew louder."Fire!" cried Mrs. Prothero, and she beat the dinner-gong.

And we ran down the garden, with the snowballs in our arms, toward the house; andsmoke, indeed, was pouring out of the dining-room, and the gong was bombilating,and Mrs. Prothero was announcing ruin like a town crier in Pompeii. This was betterthan all the cats in Wales standing on the wall in a row. We bounded into the house,laden with snowballs, and stopped at the open door of the smoke-filled room.

Something was burning all right; perhaps it was Mr. Prothero, who always slept thereafter midday dinner with a newspaper over his face. But he was standing in the middleof the room, saying, "A fine Christmas!" and smacking at the smoke with a slipper.

"Call the fire brigade," cried Mrs. Prothero as she beat the gong."There won't be there," said Mr. Prothero, "it's Christmas."There was no fire to be seen, only clouds of smoke and Mr. Prothero standing in themiddle of them, waving his slipper as though he were conducting."Do something," he said. And we threw all our snowballs into the smoke - I think wemissed Mr. Prothero - and ran out of the house to the telephone box."Let's call the police as well," Jim said. "And the ambulance." "And Ernie Jenkins, helikes fires."

But we only called the fire brigade, and soon the fire engine came and three tall men inhelmets brought a hose into the house and Mr. Prothero got out just in time beforethey turned it on. Nobody could have had a noisier Christmas Eve. And when the



firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt,Miss. Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them. Jim and I waited, very quietly,to hear what she would say to them. She said the right thing, always. She looked atthe three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cindersand dissolving snowballs, and she said, "Would you like anything to read?"

Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birdsthe color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sangand wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in dampfront farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English andthe bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse,when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed. But here asmall boy says: "It snowed last year, too. I made a snowman and my brother knockedit down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea."

"But that was not the same snow," I say. "Our snow was not only shaken from whitewash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and driftedout of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofsof the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely -ivied the walls and settledon the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, tornChristmas cards."

"Were there postmen then, too?""With sprinkling eyes and wind-cherried noses, on spread, frozen feet they crunched upto the doors and mittened on them manfully. But all that the children could hear was aringing of bells.""You mean that the postman went rat-a-tat-tat and the doors rang?""I mean that the bells the children could hear were inside them.""I only hear thunder sometimes, never bells.""There were church bells, too.""Inside them?""No, no, no, in the bat-black, snow-white belfries, tugged by bishops and storks. Andthey rang their tidings over the bandaged town, over the frozen foam of the powderand ice-cream hills, over the crackling sea. It seemed that all the churches boomed forjoy under my window; and the weathercocks crew for Christmas, on our fence."

"Get back to the postmen""They were just ordinary postmen, found of walking and dogs and Christmas and thesnow. They knocked on the doors with blue knuckles ....""Ours has got a black knocker....""And then they stood on the white Welcome mat in the little, drifted porches andhuffed and puffed, making ghosts with their breath, and jogged from foot to foot likesmall boys wanting to go out.""And then the presents?""And then the Presents, after the Christmas box. And the cold postman, with a rose onhis button-nose, tingled down the tea-tray-slithered run of the chilly glinting hill. Hewent in his ice-bound boots like a man on fishmonger's slabs. "He wagged his bag likea frozen camel's hump, dizzily turned the corner on one foot, and, by God, he wasgone."

"Get back to the Presents.""There were the Useful Presents: engulfing mufflers of the old coach days, and mittens



made for giant sloths; zebra scarfs of a substance like silky gum that could betug-o'-warred down to the galoshes; blinding tam-o'-shanters like patchwork tea coziesand bunny-suited busbies and balaclavas for victims of head-shrinking tribes; fromaunts who always wore wool next to the skin there were mustached and rasping veststhat made you wonder why the aunts had any skin left at all; and once I had a littlecrocheted nose bag from an aunt now, alas, no longer whinnying with us. Andpictureless books in which small boys, though warned with quotations not to, wouldskate on Farmer Giles' pond and did and drowned; and books that told me everythingabout the wasp, except why."

"Go on the Useless Presents.""Bags of moist and many-colored jelly babies and a folded flag and a false nose and atram-conductor's cap and a machine that punched tickets and rang a bell; never acatapult; once, by mistake that no one could explain, a little hatchet; and a celluloidduck that made, when you pressed it, a most unducklike sound, a mewing moo that anambitious cat might make who wished to be a cow; and a painting book in which Icould make the grass, the trees, the sea and the animals any colour I pleased, and stillthe dazzling sky-blue sheep are grazing in the red field under the rainbow-billed andpea-green birds. Hardboileds, toffee, fudge and allsorts, crunches, cracknels, humbugs,glaciers, marzipan, and butterwelsh for the Welsh. And troops of bright tin soldierswho, if they could not fight, could always run. And Snakes-and-Families and HappyLadders. And Easy Hobbi-Games for Little Engineers, complete with instructions. Oh,easy for Leonardo! And a whistle to make the dogs bark to wake up the old man nextdoor to make him beat on the wall with his stick to shake our picture off the wall. Anda packet of cigarettes: you put one in your mouth and you stood at the corner of thestreet and you waited for hours, in vain, for an old lady to scold you for smoking acigarette, and then with a smirk you ate it. And then it was breakfast under theballoons."

"Were there Uncles like in our house?""There are always Uncles at Christmas. The same Uncles. And on Christmas morning,with dog-disturbing whistle and sugar fags, I would scour the swatched town for thenews of the little world, and find always a dead bird by the Post Office or by the whitedeserted swings; perhaps a robin, all but one of his fires out. Men and women wadingor scooping back from chapel, with taproom noses and wind-bussed cheeks, all albinos,huddles their stiff black jarring feathers against the irreligious snow. Mistletoe hungfrom the gas brackets in all the front parlors; there was sherry and walnuts and bottledbeer and crackers by the dessertspoons; and cats in their fur-abouts watched the fires;and the high-heaped fire spat, all ready for the chestnuts and the mulling pokers.Some few large men sat in the front parlors, without their collars, Uncles almostcertainly, trying their new cigars, holding them out judiciously at arms' length,returning them to their mouths, coughing, then holding them out again as thoughwaiting for the explosion; and some few small aunts, not wanted in the kitchen, noranywhere else for that matter, sat on the very edge of their chairs, poised and brittle,afraid to break, like faded cups and saucers."

Not many those mornings trod the piling streets: an old man always, fawn-bowlered,yellow-gloved and, at this time of year, with spats of snow, would take hisconstitutional to the white bowling green and back, as he would take it wet or fire onChristmas Day or Doomsday; sometimes two hale young men, with big pipes blazing,no overcoats and wind blown scarfs, would trudge, unspeaking, down to the forlornsea, to work up an appetite, to blow away the fumes, who knows, to walk into the



waves until nothing of them was left but the two furling smoke clouds of theirinextinguishable briars. Then I would be slap-dashing home, the gravy smell of thedinners of others, the bird smell, the brandy, the pudding and mince, coiling up to mynostrils, when out of a snow-clogged side lane would come a boy the spit of myself,with a pink-tipped cigarette and the violet past of a black eye, cocky as a bullfinch,leering all to himself.

I hated him on sight and sound, and would be about to put my dog whistle to my lipsand blow him off the face of Christmas when suddenly he, with a violet wink, put hiswhistle to his lips and blew so stridently, so high, so exquisitely loud, that gobblingfaces, their cheeks bulged with goose, would press against their tinsled windows, thewhole length of the white echoing street. For dinner we had turkey and blazingpudding, and after dinner the Uncles sat in front of the fire, loosened all buttons, puttheir large moist hands over their watch chains, groaned a little and slept. Mothers,aunts and sisters scuttled to and fro, bearing tureens. Auntie Bessie, who had alreadybeen frightened, twice, by a clock-work mouse, whimpered at the sideboard and hadsome elderberry wine. The dog was sick. Auntie Dosie had to have three aspirins, butAuntie Hannah, who liked port, stood in the middle of the snowbound back yard,singing like a big-bosomed thrush. I would blow up balloons to see how big they wouldblow up to; and, when they burst, which they all did, the Uncles jumped and rumbled.In the rich and heavy afternoon, the Uncles breathing like dolphins and the snowdescending, I would sit among festoons and Chinese lanterns and nibble dates and tryto make a model man-o'-war, following the Instructions for Little Engineers, andproduce what might be mistaken for a sea-going tramcar.

Or I would go out, my bright new boots squeaking, into the white world, on to theseaward hill, to call on Jim and Dan and Jack and to pad through the still streets,leaving huge footprints on the hidden pavements."I bet people will think there's been hippos.""What would you do if you saw a hippo coming down our street?""I'd go like this, bang! I'd throw him over the railings and roll him down the hill andthen I'd tickle him under the ear and he'd wag his tail.""What would you do if you saw two hippos?"

Iron-flanked and bellowing he-hippos clanked and battered through the scudding snowtoward us as we passed Mr. Daniel's house."Let's post Mr. Daniel a snow-ball through his letter box.""Let's write things in the snow.""Let's write, 'Mr. Daniel looks like a spaniel' all over his lawn."Or we walked on the white shore. "Can the fishes see it's snowing?"

The silent one-clouded heavens drifted on to the sea. Now we were snow-blindtravelers lost on the north hills, and vast dewlapped dogs, with flasks round theirnecks, ambled and shambled up to us, baying "Excelsior." We returned home throughthe poor streets where only a few children fumbled with bare red fingers in thewheel-rutted snow and cat-called after us, their voices fading away, as we trudgeduphill, into the cries of the dock birds and the hooting of ships out in the whirling bay.And then, at tea the recovered Uncles would be jolly; and the ice cake loomed in thecenter of the table like a marble grave. Auntie Hannah laced her tea with rum, becauseit was only once a year.

Bring out the tall tales now that we told by the fire as the gaslight bubbled like a diver.



Ghosts whooed like owls in the long nights when I dared not look over my shoulder;animals lurked in the cubbyhole under the stairs and the gas meter ticked. And Iremember that we went singing carols once, when there wasn't the shaving of a moonto light the flying streets. At the end of a long road was a drive that led to a largehouse, and we stumbled up the darkness of the drive that night, each one of us afraid,each one holding a stone in his hand in case, and all of us too brave to say a word. Thewind through the trees made noises as of old and unpleasant and maybe webfootedmen wheezing in caves. We reached the black bulk of the house. "What shall we givethem? Hark the Herald?""No," Jack said, "Good King Wencelas. I'll count three." One, two three, and we beganto sing, our voices high and seemingly distant in the snow-felted darkness round thehouse that was occupied by nobody we knew. We stood close together, near the darkdoor. Good King Wencelas looked out On the Feast of Stephen ... And then a small, dryvoice, like the voice of someone who has not spoken for a long time, joined oursinging: a small, dry, eggshell voice from the other side of the door: a small dry voicethrough the keyhole. And when we stopped running we were outside our house; thefront room was lovely; balloons floated under the hot-water-bottle-gulping gas;everything was good again and shone over the town."Perhaps it was a ghost," Jim said."Perhaps it was trolls," Dan said, who was always reading."Let's go in and see if there's any jelly left," Jack said. And we did that.

Always on Christmas night there was music. An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang"Cherry Ripe," and another uncle sang "Drake's Drum." It was very warm in the littlehouse. Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip wine, sang a song aboutBleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like aBird's Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed. Lookingthrough my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-coloredsnow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hearthe music rising from them up the long, steady falling night. I turned the gas down, Igot into bed. I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.

Dylan Thomas



A Letter to My Aunt

A Letter To My Aunt Discussing The Correct Approach To Modern Poetry

To you, my aunt, who would exploreThe literary Chankley Bore,The paths are hard, for you are notA literary HottentotBut just a kind and cultured dameWho knows not Eliot (to her shame).Fie on you, aunt, that you should seeNo genius in David G.,No elemental form and soundIn T.S.E. and Ezra Pound.Fie on you, aunt! I'll show you howTo elevate your middle brow,And how to scale and see the sightsFrom modernist Parnassian heights.

First buy a hat, no Paris modelBut one the Swiss wear when they yodel,A bowler thing with one or twoFeathers to conceal the view;And then in sandals walk the street(All modern painters use their feetFor painting, on their canvas strips,Their wives or mothers, minus hips).

Perhaps it would be best if youCreated something very new,A dirty novel done in ErseOr written backwards in Welsh verse,Or paintings on the backs of vests,Or Sanskrit psalms on lepers' chests.But if this proved imposs-i-blePerhaps it would be just as well,For you could then write what you please,And modern verse is done with ease.

Do not forget that 'limpet' rhymesWith 'strumpet' in these troubled times,And commas are the worst of crimes;Few understand the works of Cummings,And few James Joyce's mental slummings,And few young Auden's coded chatter;But then it is the few that matter.Never be lucid, never state,If you would be regarded great,The simplest thought or sentiment,(For thought, we know, is decadent);Never omit such vital wordsAs belly, genitals and -----,For these are things that play a part



(And what a part) in all good art.Remember this: each rose is wormy,And every lovely woman's germy;Remember this: that love dependsOn how the Gallic letter bends;Remember, too, that life is hellAnd even heaven has a smellOf putrefying angels whoMake deadly whoopee in the blue.These things remembered, what can stopA poet going to the top?

A final word: before you startThe convulsions of your art,Remove your brains, take out your heart;Minus these curses, you can beA genius like David G.

Take courage, aunt, and send your stuffTo Geoffrey Grigson with my luff,And may I yet live to admireHow well your poems light the fire.

Dylan Thomas



A Process in the Weather of the Heart

A process in the weather of the heartTurns damp to dry; the golden shotStorms in the freezing tomb.A weather in the quarter of the veinsTurns night to day; blood in their sunsLights up the living worm.

A process in the eye forwarnsThe bones of blindness; and the wombDrives in a death as life leaks out.

A darkness in the weather of the eyeIs half its light; the fathomed seaBreaks on unangled land.The seed that makes a forest of the loinForks half its fruit; and half drops down,Slow in a sleeping wind.

A weather in the flesh and boneIs damp and dry; the quick and deadMove like two ghosts before the eye.

A process in the weather of the worldTurns ghost to ghost; each mothered childSits in their double shade.A process blows the moon into the sun,Pulls down the shabby curtains of the skin;And the heart gives up its dead.

Dylan Thomas



A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

Never until the mankind makingBird beast and flowerFathering and all humbling darknessTells with silence the last light breakingAnd the still hourIs come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the roundZion of the water beadAnd the synagogue of the ear of cornShall I let pray the shadow of a soundOr sow my salt seedIn the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child's death.I shall not murderThe mankind of her going with a grave truthNor blaspheme down the stations of the breathWith any furtherElegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,Robed in the long friends,The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,Secret by the unmourning waterOf the riding Thames.After the first death, there is no other.

Dylan Thomas



After the Funeral (In memory of Ann Jones)

After the funeral, mule praises, brays,Windshake of sailshaped ears, muffle-toed tapTap happily of one peg in the thickGrave's foot, blinds down the lids, the teeth in black,The spittled eyes, the salt ponds in the sleeves,Morning smack of the spade that wakes up sleep,Shakes a desolate boy who slits his throatIn the dark of the coffin and sheds dry leaves,That breaks one bone to light with a judgment clout'After the feast of tear-stuffed time and thistlesIn a room with a stuffed fox and a stale fern,I stand, for this memorial's sake, aloneIn the snivelling hours with dead, humped AnnWhose hodded, fountain heart once fell in puddlesRound the parched worlds of Wales and drowned each sun(Though this for her is a monstrous image blindlyMagnified out of praise; her death was a still drop;She would not have me sinking in the holyFlood of her heart's fame; she would lie dumb and deepAnd need no druid of her broken body).But I, Ann's bard on a raised hearth, call allThe seas to service that her wood-tongud virtueBabble like a bellbuoy over the hymning heads,Bow down the walls of the ferned and foxy woodsThat her love sing and swing through a brown chapel,Blees her bent spirit with four, crossing birds.Her flesh was meek as milk, but this skyward statueWith the wild breast and blessed and giant skullIs carved from her in a room with a wet windowIn a fiercely mourning house in a crooked year.I know her scrubbed and sour humble handsLie with religion in their cramp, her threadbareWhisper in a damp word, her wits drilled hollow,Her fist of a face died clenched on a round pain;And sculptured Ann is seventy years of stone.These cloud-sopped, marble hands, this monumentalArgument of the hewn voice, gesture and psalmStorm me forever over her grave untilThe stuffed lung of the fox twitch and cry LoveAnd the strutting fern lay seeds on the black sill.

Dylan Thomas



All All and All

I

All all and all the dry worlds lever,Stage of the ice, the solid ocean,All from the oil, the pound of lava.City of spring, the governed flower,Turns in the earth that turns the ashenTowns around on a wheel of fire.

How now my flesh, my naked fellow,Dug of the sea, the glanded morrow,Worm in the scalp, the staked and fallow.All all and all, the corpse's lover,Skinny as sin, the foaming marrow,All of the flesh, the dry worlds lever.

II

Fear not the waking world, my mortal,Fear not the flat, synthetic blood,Nor the heart in the ribbing metal.Fear not the tread, the seeded milling,The trigger and scythe, the bridal blade,Nor the flint in the lover's mauling.

Man of my flesh, the jawbone riven,Know now the flesh's lock and vice,And the cage for the scythe-eyed raver.Know, O my bone, the jointed lever,Fear not the screws that turn the voice,And the face to the driven lover.

III

All all and all the dry worlds couple,Ghost with her ghost, contagious manWith the womb of his shapeless people.All that shapes from the caul and suckle,Stroke of mechanical flesh on mine,Square in these worlds the mortal circle.

Flower, flower the people's fusion,O light in zenith, the coupled bud,And the flame in the flesh's vision.Out of the sea, the drive of oil,Socket and grave, the brassy blood,Flower, flower, all all and all.

Dylan Thomas



All All And All The Dry Worlds Lever

I

All all and all the dry worlds lever,Stage of the ice, the solid ocean,All from the oil, the pound of lava.City of spring, the governed flower,Turns in the earth that turns the ashenTowns around on a wheel of fire.

How now my flesh, my naked fellow,Dug of the sea, the glanded morrow,Worm in the scalp, the staked and fallow.All all and all, the corpse's lover,Skinny as sin, the foaming marrow,All of the flesh, the dry worlds lever.

II

Fear not the waking world, my mortal,Fear not the flat, synthetic blood,Nor the heart in the ribbing metal.Fear not the tread, the seeded milling,The trigger and scythe, the bridal blade,Nor the flint in the lover's mauling.

Man of my flesh, the jawbone riven,Know now the flesh's lock and vice,And the cage for the scythe-eyed raver.Know, O my bone, the jointed lever,Fear not the screws that turn the voice,And the face to the driven lover.

III

All all and all the dry worlds couple,Ghost with her ghost, contagious manWith the womb of his shapeless people.All that shapes from the caul and suckle,Stroke of mechanical flesh on mine,Square in these worlds the mortal circle.

Flower, flower the people's fusion,O light in zenith, the coupled bud,And the flame in the flesh's vision.Out of the sea, the drive of oil,Socket and grave, the brassy blood,Flower, flower, all all and all.

Dylan Thomas



All That I Owe the Fellows of the Grave

All that I owe the fellows of the graveAnd all the dead bequeathed from pale estatesLies in the fortuned bone, the flask of blood,Like senna stirs along the ravaged roots.O all I owe is all the flesh inherits,My fathers' loves that pull upon my nerves,My sisters tears that sing upon my headMy brothers' blood that salts my open wounds

Heir to the scalding veins that hold love's drop,My fallen filled, that had the hint of death,Heir to the telling senses that aloneAcquaint the flesh with a remembered itch,I round this heritage as rounds the sunHis winy sky, and , as the candles moon,Cast light upon my weather. I am heirTo women who have twisted their last smile,To children who were suckled on a plague,To young adorers dying on a kiss.All such disease I doctor in my blood,And all such love's a shrub sown in the breath.

Then look, my eyes, upon this bonehead fortuneAnd browse upon the postures of the dead;All night and day I eye the ragged globeThrough periscopes rightsighted from the grave;All night and day I wander in these sameWax clothes that wax upon the ageing ribs;All night my fortune slumbers in its sheet.Then look, my heart, upon the scarlet trove,And look, my grain, upon the falling wheat;All night my fortune slumbers in its sheet.

Dylan Thomas



Altarwise by Owl-Light

Altarwise by owl-light in the half-way houseThe gentleman lay graveward with his furies;Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam,And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,Bit out the mandrake with to-morrows scream.Then, penny-eyed, that gentlemen of wounds,Old cock from nowheres and the heaven's egg,With bones unbuttoned to the half-way winds,Hatched from the windy salvage on one leg,Scraped at my cradle in a walking wordThat night of time under the Christward shelter:I am the long world's gentlemen, he said,And share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer.

Death is all metaphors, shape in one history;The child that sucketh long is shooting up,The planet-ducted pelican of circlesWeans on an artery the genders strip;Child of the short spark in a shapeless countrySoon sets alight a long stick from the cradle;The horizontal cross-bones of Abaddon,You by the cavern over the black stairs,Rung bone and blade, the verticals of Adam,And, manned by midnight, Jacob to the stars.Hairs of your head, then said the hollow agent,Are but the roots of nettles and feathersOver the groundowrks thrusting through a pavementAnd hemlock-headed in the wood of weathers.

First there was the lamb on knocking kneesAnd three dead seasons on a climbing graveThat Adam's wether in the flock of horns,Butt of the tree-tailed worm that mounted Eve,Horned down with skullfoot and the skull of toesOn thunderous pavements in the garden of time;Rip of the vaults, I took my marrow-ladleOut of the wrinkled undertaker's van,And, Rip Van Winkle from a timeless cradle,Dipped me breast-deep in the descending bone;The black ram, shuffling of the year, old winter,Alone alive among his mutton fold,We rung our weathering changes on the ladder,Said the antipodes, and twice spring chimed.

What is the metre of the dictionary?The size of genesis? the short spark's gender?Shade without shape? the shape of the Pharaohs echo?(My shape of age nagging the wounded whisper.)Which sixth of wind blew out the burning gentry?(Questions are hunchbacks to the poker marrow.)What of a bamboo man amomg your acres?



Corset the boneyards for a crooked boy?Button your bodice on a hump of splinters,My camel's eyes will needle through the shroud.Loves reflection of the mushroom features,Still snapped by night in the bread-sided field,Once close-up smiling in the wall of pictures,Arc-lamped thrown back upon the cutting flood.

Dylan Thomas



Among Those Killed in the Dawn Raid Was a Man Aged a Hundred

When the morning was waking over the warHe put on his clothes and stepped out and he died,The locks yawned loose and a blast blew them wide,He dropped where he loved on the burst pavement stoneAnd the funeral grains of the slaughtered floor.Tell his street on its back he stopped a sunAnd the craters of his eyes grew springshots and fireWhen all the keys shot from the locks, and rang.Dig no more for the chains of his grey-haired heart.The heavenly ambulance drawn by a woundAssembling waits for the spade's ring on the cage.O keep his bones away from the common cart,The morning is flying on the wings of his ageAnd a hundred storks perch on the sun's right hand.

Dylan Thomas



And Death Shall Have No Dominion

And death shall have no dominion.Dead mean naked they shall be oneWith the man in the wind and the west moon;When their bones are picked clean and the clen bones gone,They shall have stars at elbow and foot;Though they go mad they shall be sane,Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;Though lovers be lost love shall not;And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.Under the windings of the seaThey lying long shall not die windily;Twisting on racks when sinews give way,Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;Faith in their hands shall snap in two,And the unicorn evils run them through;Split all ends up they shan't crack;And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.No more may gulls cry at their earsOr waves break loud on the seashores;Where blew a flower may a flower no moreLift its head to the blows of the rain;Through they be mad and dead as nails,Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,And death shall have no dominion.

Dylan Thomas



Author's Prologue

This day winding down nowAt God speeded summer's endIn the torrent salmon sun,In my seashaken houseOn a breakneck of rocksTangled with chirrup and fruit,Froth, flute, fin, and quillAt a wood's dancing hoof,By scummed, starfish sandsWith their fishwife crossGulls, pipers, cockles, and snails,Out there, crow black, menTackled with clouds, who kneelTo the sunset nets,Geese nearly in heaven, boysStabbing, and herons, and shellsThat speak seven seas,Eternal waters awayFrom the cities of nineDays' night whose towers will catchIn the religious windLike stalks of tall, dry straw,At poor peace I singTo you strangers (though songIs a burning and crested act,The fire of birds inThe world's turning wood,For my swan, splay sounds),Out of these seathumbed leavesThat will fly and fallLike leaves of trees and as soonCrumble and undieInto the dogdayed night.Seaward the salmon, sucked sun slips,And the dumb swans drub blueMy dabbed bay's dusk, as I hackThis rumpus of shapesFor you to knowHow I, a spining man,Glory also this star, birdRoared, sea born, man torn, blood blest.Hark: I trumpet the place,From fish to jumping hill! Look:I build my bellowing arkTo the best of my loveAs the flood begins,Out of the fountainheadOf fear, rage read, manalive,Molten and mountainous to streamOver the wound asleepSheep white hollow farmsTo Wales in my arms.



Hoo, there, in castle keep,You king singsong owls, who moonbeamThe flickering runs and diveThe dingle furred deer dead!Huloo, on plumbed bryns,O my ruffled ring dovein the hooting, nearly darkWith Welsh and reverent rook,Coo rooning the woods' praise,who moons her blue notes from her nestDown to the curlew herd!Ho, hullaballoing clanAgape, with woeIn your beaks, on the gabbing capes!Heigh, on horseback hill, jackWhisking hare! whoHears, there, this fox light, my flood ship'sClangour as I hew and smite(A clash of anvils for myHubbub and fiddle, this tuneOn atounged puffball)But animals thick as theivesOn God's rough tumbling grounds(Hail to His beasthood!).Beasts who sleep good and thin,Hist, in hogback woods! The haystackedHollow farms ina throngOf waters cluck and cling,And barnroofs cockcrow war!O kingdom of neighbors finnedFelled and quilled, flash to my patchWork ark and the moonshineDrinking Noah of the bay,With pelt, and scale, and fleece:Only the drowned deep bellsOf sheep and churches noisePoor peace as the sun setsAnd dark shoals every holy field.We will ride out alone then,Under the stars of Wales,Cry, Multiudes of arks! AcrossThe water lidded lands,Manned with their loves they'll moveLike wooden islands, hill to hill.Huloo, my prowed dove with a flute!Ahoy, old, sea-legged fox,Tom tit and Dai mouse!My ark sings in the sunAt God speeded summer's endAnd the flood flowers now.

Dylan Thomas



Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait

The bows glided down, and the coastBlackened with birds took a last lookAt his thrashing hair and whale-blue eye;The trodden town rang its cobbles for luck.

Then good-bye to the fishermannedBoat with its anchor free and fastAs a bird hooking over the sea,High and dry by the top of the mast,

Whispered the affectionate sandAnd the bulwarks of the dazzled quay.For my sake sail, and never look back,Said the looking land.

Sails drank the wind, and white as milkHe sped into the drinking dark;The sun shipwrecked west on a pearlAnd the moon swam out of its hulk.

Funnels and masts went by in a whirl.Good-bye to the man on the sea-legged deckTo the gold gut that sings on his reelTo the bait that stalked out of the sack,

For we saw him throw to the swift floodA girl alive with his hooks through her lips;All the fishes were rayed in blood,Said the dwindling ships.

Good-bye to chimneys and funnels,Old wives that spin in the smoke,He was blind to the eyes of candlesIn the praying windows of waves

But heard his bait buck in the wakeAnd tussle in a shoal of loves.Now cast down your rod, for the wholeOf the sea is hilly with whales,

She longs among horses and angels,The rainbow-fish bend in her joys,Floated the lost cathedralChimes of the rocked buoys.

Where the anchor rode like a gullMiles over the moonstruck boatA squall of birds bellowed and fell,A cloud blew the rain from its throat;

He saw the storm smoke out to killWith fuming bows and ram of ice,



Fire on starlight, rake Jesu's stream;And nothing shone on the water's face

But the oil and bubble of the moon,Plunging and piercing in his courseThe lured fish under the foamWitnessed with a kiss.

Whales in the wake like capes and AlpsQuaked the sick sea and snouted deep,Deep the great bushed bait with raining lipsSlipped the fins of those humpbacked tons

And fled their love in a weaving dip.Oh, Jericho was falling in their lungs!She nipped and dived in the nick of love,Spun on a spout like a long-legged ball

Till every beast blared down in a swerveTill every turtle crushed from his shellTill every bone in the rushing graveRose and crowed and fell!

Good luck to the hand on the rod,There is thunder under its thumbs;Gold gut is a lightning thread,His fiery reel sings off its flames,

The whirled boat in the burn of his bloodIs crying from nets to knives,Oh the shearwater birds and their boatsized broodOh the bulls of Biscay and their calves

Are making under the green, laid veilThe long-legged beautiful bait their wives.Break the black news and paint on a sailHuge weddings in the waves,

Over the wakeward-flashing sprayOver the gardens of the floorClash out the mounting dolphin's day,My mast is a bell-spire,

Strike and smoothe, for my decks are drums,Sing through the water-spoken prowThe octopus walking into her limbsThe polar eagle with his tread of snow.

From salt-lipped beak to the kick of the sternSing how the seal has kissed her dead!The long, laid minute's bride drifts onOld in her cruel bed.



Over the graveyard in the waterMountains and galleries beneathNightingale and hyenaRejoicing for that drifting death

Sing and howl through sand and anemoneValley and sahara in a shell,Oh all the wanting flesh his enemyThrown to the sea in the shell of a girl

Is old as water and plain as an eel;Always good-bye to the long-legged breadScattered in the paths of his heelsFor the salty birds fluttered and fed

And the tall grains foamed in their bills;Always good-bye to the fires of the face,For the crab-backed dead on the sea-bed roseAnd scuttled over her eyes,

The blind, clawed stare is cold as sleet.The tempter under the eyelidWho shows to the selves asleepMast-high moon-white women naked

Walking in wishes and lovely for shameIs dumb and gone with his flame of brides.Susannah's drowned in the bearded streamAnd no-one stirs at Sheba's side

But the hungry kings of the tides;Sin who had a woman's shapeSleeps till Silence blows on a cloudAnd all the lifted waters walk and leap.

Lucifer that bird's droppingOut of the sides of the northHas melted away and is lostIs always lost in her vaulted breath,

Venus lies star-struck in her woundAnd the sensual ruins makeSeasons over the liquid world,White springs in the dark.

Always good-bye, cried the voices through the shell,Good-bye always, for the flesh is castAnd the fisherman winds his reelWith no more desire than a ghost.



Always good luck, praised the finned in the featherBird after dark and the laughing fishAs the sails drank up the hail of thunderAnd the long-tailed lightning lit his catch.

The boat swims into the six-year weather,A wind throws a shadow and it freezes fast.See what the gold gut drags from underMountains and galleries to the crest!

See what clings to hair and skullAs the boat skims on with drinking wings!The statues of great rain stand still,And the flakes fall like hills.

Sing and strike his heavy haulToppling up the boatside in a snow of light!His decks are drenched with miracles.Oh miracle of fishes! The long dead bite!

Out of the urn a size of a manOut of the room the weight of his troubleOut of the house that holds a townIn the continent of a fossil

One by one in dust and shawl,Dry as echoes and insect-faced,His fathers cling to the hand of the girlAnd the dead hand leads the past,

Leads them as children and as airOn to the blindly tossing tops;The centuries throw back their hairAnd the old men sing from newborn lips:

Time is bearing another son.Kill Time! She turns in her pain!The oak is felled in the acornAnd the hawk in the egg kills the wren.

He who blew the great fire inAnd died on a hiss of flamesOr walked the earth in the eveningCounting the denials of the grains

Clings to her drifting hair, and climbs;And he who taught their lips to singWeeps like the risen sun amongThe liquid choirs of his tribes.

The rod bends low, divining land,And through the sundered water crawls



A garden holding to her handWith birds and animals

With men and women and waterfallsTrees cool and dry in the whirlpool of shipsAnd stunned and still on the green, laid veilSand with legends in its virgin laps

And prophets loud on the burned dunes;Insects and valleys hold her thighs hard,Times and places grip her breast bone,She is breaking with seasons and clouds;

Round her trailed wrist fresh water weaves,with moving fish and rounded stonesUp and down the greater wavesA separate river breathes and runs;

Strike and sing his catch of fieldsFor the surge is sown with barley,The cattle graze on the covered foam,The hills have footed the waves away,

With wild sea fillies and soaking bridlesWith salty colts and gales in their limbsAll the horses of his haul of miraclesGallop through the arched, green farms,

Trot and gallop with gulls upon themAnd thunderbolts in their manes.O Rome and Sodom To-morrow and LondonThe country tide is cobbled with towns

And steeples pierce the cloud on her shoulderAnd the streets that the fisherman combedWhen his long-legged flesh was a wind on fireAnd his loin was a hunting flame

Coil from the thoroughfares of her hairAnd terribly lead him home aliveLead her prodigal home to his terror,The furious ox-killing house of love.

Down, down, down, under the ground,Under the floating villages,Turns the moon-chained and water-woundMetropolis of fishes,

There is nothing left of the sea but its sound,Under the earth the loud sea walks,In deathbeds of orchards the boat dies downAnd the bait is drowned among hayricks,



Land, land, land, nothing remainsOf the pacing, famous sea but its speech,And into its talkative seven tombsThe anchor dives through the floors of a church.

Good-bye, good luck, struck the sun and the moon,To the fisherman lost on the land.He stands alone in the door of his home,With his long-legged heart in his hand.

Dylan Thomas



Before I Knocked

Before I knocked and flesh let enter,With liquid hands tapped on the womb,I who was as shapeless as the waterThat shaped the Jordan near my homeWas brother to Mnetha's daughterAnd sister to the fathering worm.

I who was deaf to spring and summer,Who knew not sun nor moon by name,Felt thud beneath my flesh's armour,As yet was in a molten formThe leaden stars, the rainy hammerSwung by my father from his dome.

I knew the message of the winter,The darted hail, the childish snow,And the wind was my sister suitor;Wind in me leaped, the hellborn dew;My veins flowed with the Eastern weather;Ungotten I knew night and day.

As yet ungotten, I did suffer;The rack of dreams my lily bonesDid twist into a living cipher,And flesh was snipped to cross the linesOf gallow crosses on the liverAnd brambles in the wringing brains.

My throat knew thirst before the structureOf skin and vein around the wellWhere words and water make a mixtureUnfailing till the blood runs foul;My heart knew love, my belly hunger;I smelt the maggot in my stool.

And time cast forth my mortal creatureTo drift or drown upon the seasAcquainted with the salt adventureOf tides that never touch the shores.I who was rich was made the richerBy sipping at the vine of days.

I, born of flesh and ghost, was neitherA ghost nor man, but mortal ghost.And I was struck down by death's feather.I was a mortal to the lastLong breath that carried to my fatherThe message of his dying christ.

You who bow down at cross and altar,Remember me and pity HimWho took my flesh and bone for armour



And doublecrossed my mother's womb.

Dylan Thomas



Clown in the Moon

My tears are like the quiet driftOf petals from some magic rose;And all my grief flows from the riftOf unremembered skies and snows.

I think, that if I touched the earth,It would crumble;It is so sad and beautiful,So tremulously like a dream.

Dylan Thomas



Deaths and Entrances

On almost the incendiary eveOf several near deaths,When one at the great least of your best lovedAnd always known must leaveLions and fires of his flying breath,Of your immortal friendsWho'd raise the organs of the counted dustTo shoot and sing your praise,One who called deepest down shall hold his peaceThat cannot sink or ceaseEndlessly to his woundIn many married London's estranging grief.

On almost the incendiary eveWhen at your lips and keys,Locking, unlocking, the murdered strangers weave,One who is most unknown,Your polestar neighbour, sun of another street,Will dive up to his tears.He'll bathe his raining blood in the male seaWho strode for your own deadAnd wind his globe out of your water threadAnd load the throats of shellswith every cry since lightFlashed first across his thunderclapping eyes.

On almost the incendiary eveOf deaths and entrances,When near and strange wounded on London's wavesHave sought your single grave,One enemy, of many, who knows wellYour heart is luminousIn the watched dark, quivering through locks and caves,Will pull the thunderboltsTo shut the sun, plunge, mount your darkened keysAnd sear just riders back,Until that one loved leastLooms the last Samson of your zodiac.

Dylan Thomas



Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Do not go gentle into that good night,Old age should burn and rave at close of day;Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,Because their words had forked no lightning theyDo not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how brightTheir frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sightBlind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on that sad height,Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.Do not go gentle into that good night.Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Dylan Thomas



Ears in the Turrets Hear

Ears in the turrets hearHands grumble on the door,Eyes in the gables seeThe fingers at the locks.Shall I unbolt or stayAlone till the day I dieUnseen by stranger-eyesIn this white house?Hands, hold you poison or grapes?

Beyond this island boundBy a thin sea of fleshAnd a bone coast,The land lies out of soundAnd the hills out of mind.No birds or flying fishDisturbs this island’s rest.

Ears in this island hearThe wind pass like a fire,Eyes in this island seeShips anchor off the bay.Shall I run to the shipsWith the wind in my hair,Or stay till the day I dieAnd welcome no sailor?Ships, hold you poison or grapes?

Hands grumble on the door,Ships anchor off the bay,Rain beats the sand and slates.Shall I let in the stranger,Shall I welcome the sailor,Or stay till the day I die?

Hands of the stranger and holds of the ships,Hold you poison or grapes?

Dylan Thomas



Elegy

Too proud to die; broken and blind he diedThe darkest way, and did not turn away,A cold kind man brave in his narrow pride

On that darkest day, Oh, forever mayHe lie lightly, at last, on the last, crossedHill, under the grass, in love, and there grow

Young among the long flocks, and never lie lostOr still all the numberless days of his death, thoughAbove all he longed for his mother's breast

Which was rest and dust, and in the kind groundThe darkest justice of death, blind and unblessed.Let him find no rest but be fathered and found,

I prayed in the crouching room, by his blind bed,In the muted house, one minute beforeNoon, and night, and light. the rivers of the dead

Veined his poor hand I held, and I sawThrough his unseeing eyes to the roots of the sea.(An old tormented man three-quarters blind,

I am not too proud to cry that He and heWill never never go out of my mind.All his bones crying, and poor in all but pain,

Being innocent, he dreaded that he diedHating his God, but what he was was plain:An old kind man brave in his burning pride.

The sticks of the house were his; his books he owned.Even as a baby he had never cried;Nor did he now, save to his secret wound.

Out of his eyes I saw the last light glide.Here among the liught of the lording skyAn old man is with me where I go

Walking in the meadows of his son's eyeOn whom a world of ills came down like snow.He cried as he died, fearing at last the spheres'

Last sound, the world going out without a breath:Too proud to cry, too frail to check the tears,And caught between two nights, blindness and death.

O deepest wound of all that he should dieOn that darkest day. oh, he could hideThe tears out of his eyes, too proud to cry.



Until I die he will not leave my side.)

Dylan Thomas



Especially When the October Wind

Especially when the October windWith frosty fingers punishes my hair,Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fireAnd cast a shadow crab upon the land,By the sea's side, hearing the noise of birds,Hearing the raven cough in winter sticks,My busy heart who shudders as she talksSheds the syllabic blood and drains her words.

Shut, too, in a tower of words, I markOn the horizon walking like the treesThe wordy shapes of women, and the rowsOf the star-gestured children in the park.Some let me make you of the vowelled beeches,Some of the oaken voices, from the rootsOf many a thorny shire tell you notes,Some let me make you of the water's speeches.

Behind a pot of ferns the wagging clockTells me the hour's word, the neural meaningFlies on the shafted disk, declaims the morningAnd tells the windy weather in the cock.Some let me make you of the meadow's signs;The signal grass that tells me all I knowBreaks with the wormy winter through the eye.Some let me tell you of the raven's sins.

Especially when the October wind(Some let me make you of autumnal spells,The spider-tongued, and the loud hill of Wales)With fists of turnips punishes the land,Some let me make you of the heartless words.The heart is drained that, spelling in the scurryOf chemic blood, warned of the coming fury.By the sea's side hear the dark-vowelled birds.

Dylan Thomas



Fern Hill

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughsAbout the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,The night above the dingle starry,Time let me hail and climbGolden in the heydays of his eyes,And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple townsAnd once below a time I lordly had the trees and leavesTrail with daisies and barleyDown the rivers of the windfall light.

And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barnsAbout the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,In the sun that is young once only,Time let me play and beGolden in the mercy of his means,And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calvesSang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear andcold,And the sabbath rang slowlyIn the pebbles of the holy streams.

All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hayFields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it wasairAnd playing, lovely and wateryAnd fire green as grass.And nightly under the simple starsAs I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, thenightjarsFlying with the ricks, and the horsesFlashing into the dark.

And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer whiteWith the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was allShining, it was Adam and maiden,The sky gathered againAnd the sun grew round that very day.So it must have been after the birth of the simple lightIn the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walkingwarmOut of the whinnying green stableOn to the fields of praise.

And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay houseUnder the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,In the sun born over and over,I ran my heedless ways,My wishes raced through the house high hayAnd nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allowsIn all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songsBefore the children green and golden



Follow him out of grace.

Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time wouldtake meUp to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,In the moon that is always rising,Nor that riding to sleepI should hear him fly with the high fieldsAnd wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,Time held me green and dyingThough I sang in my chains like the sea.

Dylan Thomas



Foster the Light

Foster the light nor veil the manshaped moon,Nor weather winds that blow not down the bone,But strip the twelve-winded marrow from his circle;Master the night nor serve the snowman's brainThat shapes each bushy item of the airInto a polestar pointed on an icicle.

Murmur of spring nor crush the cockerel's eggs,Nor hammer back a season in the figs,But graft these four-fruited ridings on your country;Farmer in time of frost the burning leagues,By red-eyed orchards sow the seeds of snow,In your young years the vegetable century.

And father all nor fail the fly-lord's acre,Nor sprout on owl-seed like a goblin-sucker,But rail with your wizard's ribs the heart-shaped planet;Of mortal voices to the ninnies' choir,High lord esquire, speak up the singing cloud,And pluck a mandrake music from the marrowroot.

Roll unmanly over this turning tuft,O ring of seas, nor sorrow as I shiftFrom all my mortal lovers with a starboard smile;Nor when my love lies in the cross-boned driftNaked among the bow-and-arrow birdsShall you turn cockwise on a tufted axle.

Who gave these seas their colour in a shape,Shaped my clayfellow, and the heaven's arkIn time at flood filled with his coloured doubles;O who is glory in the shapeless maps,Now make the world of me as I have madeA merry manshape of your walking circle.

Dylan Thomas



From Love's First Fever to Her Plague

From love's first fever to her plague, from the soft secondAnd to the hollow minute of the womb,From the unfolding to the scissored caul,The time for breast and the green apron ageWhen no mouth stirred about the hanging famine,All world was one, one windy nothing,My world was christened in a stream of milk.And earth and sky were as one airy hill.The sun and mood shed one white light.

From the first print of the unshodden foot, the liftingHand, the breaking of the hair,From the first scent of the heart, the warning ghost,And to the first dumb wonder at the flesh,The sun was red, the moon was grey,The earth and sky were as two mountains meeting.

The body prospered, teeth in the marrowed gums,The growing bones, the rumour of the manseedWithin the hallowed gland, blood blessed the heart,And the four winds, that had long blown as one,Shone in my ears the light of sound,Called in my eyes the sound of light.And yellow was the multiplying sand,Each golden grain spat life into its fellow,Green was the singing house.

The plum my mother picked matured slowly,The boy she dropped from darkness at her sideInto the sided lap of light grew strong,Was muscled, matted, wise to the crying thigh,And to the voice that, like a voice of hunger,Itched in the noise of wind and sun.

And from the first declension of the fleshI learnt man's tongue, to twist the shapes of thoughtsInto the stony idiom of the brain,To shade and knit anew the patch of wordsLeft by the dead who, in their moonless acre,Need no word's warmth.The root of tongues ends in a spentout cancer,That but a name, where maggots have their X.

I learnt the verbs of will, and had my secret;The code of night tapped on my tongue;What had been one was many sounding minded.

One wound, one mind, spewed out the matter,One breast gave suck the fever's issue;From the divorcing sky I learnt the double,The two-framed globe that spun into a score;A million minds gave suck to such a bud



As forks my eye;Youth did condense; the tears of springDissolved in summer and the hundred seasons;One sun, one manna, warmed and fed.

Dylan Thomas



Hold Hard, These Ancient Minutes In the Cuckoo's Month

Hold hard, these ancient minutes in the cuckoo's month,Under the lank, fourth folly on Glamorgan's hill,As the green blooms ride upward, to the drive of time;Time, in a folly's rider, like a county manOver the vault of ridings with his hound at heel,Drives forth my men, my children, from the hanging south.

Country, your sport is summer, and December's poolsBy crane and water-tower by the seedy treesLie this fifth month unstaked, and the birds have flown;Holy hard, my country children in the world if tales,The greenwood dying as the deer fall in their tracks,The first and steepled season, to the summer's game.

And now the horns of England, in the sound of shape,Summon your snowy horsemen, and the four-stringed hill,Over the sea-gut loudening, sets a rock alive;Hurdles and guns and railings, as the boulders heave,Crack like a spring in vice, bone breaking April,Spill the lank folly's hunter and the hard-held hope.

Down fall four padding weathers on the scarlet lands,Stalking my children's faces with a tail of blood,Time, in a rider rising, from the harnessed valley;Hold hard, my country darlings, for a hawk descends,Golden Glamorgan straightens, to the falling birds.Your sport is summer as the spring runs angrily.

Dylan Thomas



Holy Spring

OOut of a bed of loveWhen that immortal hospital made one more moove to sootheThe curless counted body,And ruin and his causesOver the barbed and shooting sea assumed an armyAnd swept into our wounds and houses,I climb to greet the war in which I have no heart but onlyThat one dark I owe my light,Call for confessor and wiser mirror but there is noneTo glow after the god stoning nightAnd I am struck as lonely as a holy marker by the sun

NoPraise that the spring time is allGabriel and radiant shrubbery as the morning grows joyfulOut of the woebegone pyreAnd the multitude's sultry tear turns cool on the weeping wall,My arising prodgidalSun the father his quiver full of the infants of pure fire,But blessed be hail and upheavalThat uncalm still it is sure alone to stand and singAlone in the husk of man's homeAnd the mother and toppling house of the holy spring,If only for a last time.

Dylan Thomas



How Shall My Animal

How shall my animalWhose wizard shape I trace in the cavernous skull,Vessel of abscesses and exultation's shell,Endure burial under the spelling wall,The invoked, shrouding veil at the cap of the face,Who should be furious,Drunk as a vineyard snail, flailed like an octopus,Roaring, crawling, quarrelWith the outside weathers,The natural circle of the discovered skiesDraw down to its weird eyes?

How shall it magnetize,Towards the studded male in a bent, midnight blazeThat melts the lionhead's heel and horseshoe of the heartA brute land in the cool top of the country daysTo trot with a loud mate the haybeds of a mile,Love and labour and killIn quick, sweet, cruel light till the locked ground sproutThe black, burst sea rejoice,The bowels turn turtle,Claw of the crabbed veins squeeze from each red particleThe parched and raging voice?

Fishermen of mermenCreep and harp on the tide, sinking their charmed, bent pinWith bridebait of gold bread, I with a living skein,Tongue and ear in the thread, angle the temple-boundCurl-locked and animal cavepools of spells and bone,Trace out a tentacle,Nailed with an open eye, in the bowl of wounds and weedTo clasp my fury on groundAnd clap its great blood down;Never shall beast be born to atlas the few seasOr poise the day on a horn.

Sigh long, clay cold, lie shorn,Cast high, stunned on gilled stone; sly scissors ground in frostClack through the thicket of strength, love hewn in pillars dropsWith carved bird, saint, and suns the wrackspiked maiden mouthLops, as a bush plumed with flames, the rant of the fierce eye,Clips short the gesture of breath.Die in red feathers when the flying heaven's cut,And roll with the knocked earth:Lie dry, rest robbed, my beast.You have kicked from a dark den, leaped up the whinnying light,And dug your grave in my breast.

Dylan Thomas



I Dreamed My Genesis

I dreamed my genesis in sweat of sleep, breakingThrough the rotating shell, strongAs motor muscle on the drill, drivingThrough vision and the girdered nerve.

From limbs that had the measure of the worm, shuffledOff from the creasing flesh, filedThrough all the irons in the grass, metalOf suns in the man-melting night.

Heir to the scalding veins that hold love's drop, costlyA creature in my bones IRounded my globe of heritage, journeyIn bottom gear through night-geared man.

I dreamed my genesis and died again, shrapnelRammed in the marching heart, holeIn the stitched wound and clotted wind, muzzledDeath on the mouth that ate the gas.

Sharp in my second death I marked the hills, harvestOf hemlock and the blades, rustMy blood upon the tempered dead, forcingMy second struggling from the grass.

And power was contagious in my birth, secondRise of the skeleton andRerobing of the naked ghost. ManhoodSpat up from the resuffered pain.

I dreamed my genesis in sweat of death, fallenTwice in the feeding sea, grownStale of Adam's brine until, visionOf new man strength, I seek the sun.

Dylan Thomas



I Fellowed Sleep

I fellowed sleep who kissed me in the brain,Let fall the tear of time; the sleeper's eye,Shifting to light, turned on me like a moon.So, planning-heeled, I flew along my manAnd dropped on dreaming and the upward sky.

I fled the earth and, naked, climbed the weather,Reaching a second ground far from the stars;And there we wept I and a ghostly other,My mothers-eyed, upon the tops of trees;I fled that ground as lightly as a feather.

'My fathers' globe knocks on its nave and sings.''This that we tread was, too, your father's land.''But this we tread bears the angelic gangsSweet are their fathered faces in their wings.''These are but dreaming men. Breathe, and they fade.'

Faded my elbow ghost, the mothers-eyed,As, blowing on the angels, I was lostOn that cloud coast to each grave-grabbing shade;I blew the dreaming fellows to their bedWhere still they sleep unknowing of their ghost.

Then all the matter of the living airRaised up a voice, and, climbing on the words,I spelt my vision with a hand and hair,How light the sleeping on this soily star,How deep the waking in the worlded clouds.

There grows the hours' ladder to the sun,Each rung a love or losing to the last,The inches monkeyed by the blood of man.And old, mad man still climbing in his ghost,My fathers' ghost is climbing in the rain.

Dylan Thomas



I Have Longed to Move Away

I have longed to move awayFrom the hissing of the spent lieAnd the old terrors' continual cryGrowing more terrible as the dayGoes over the hill into the deep sea;I have longed to move awayFrom the repetition of salutes,For there are ghosts in the airAnd ghostly echoes on paper,And the thunder of calls and notes.

I have longed to move away but am afraid;Some life, yet unspent, might explodeOut of the old lie burning on the ground,And, crackling into the air, leave me half-blind.Neither by night's ancient fear,The parting of hat from hair,Pursed lips at the receiver,Shall I fall to death's feather.By these I would not care to die,Half convention and half lie.

Dylan Thomas



I See the Boys of Summer

I

I see the boys of summer in their ruinLay the gold tithings barren,Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils;Theire in their heat the winter floodsOf frozen loves they fetch their girls,And drown the cargoed apples in their tides.

These boys of light are curdlers in their folly,Sour the boiling honey;The jacks of frost they finger in the hives;There in the sun the frigid threadsOf doubt and dark they feed their nerves;The signal moon is zero in their voids.

I see the summer children in their mothersSplit up the brawned womb's weathers,Divide the night and day with fairy thumbs;There in the deep with quartered shadesOf sun and moon they paint their damsAs sunlight paints the shelling of their heads.

I see that from these boys shall men of nothingStature by seedy shifting,Or lame the air with leaping from its hearts;There from their hearts the dogdayed pulseOf love and light bursts in their throats.O see the pulse of summer in the ice.

II

But seasons must be challenged or they totterInto a chiming quarterWhere, punctual as death, we ring the stars;There, in his night, the black-tongued bellsThe sleepy man of winter pulls,Nor blows back moon-and-midnight as she blows.

We are the dark deniers, let us summonDeath from a summer woman,A muscling life from lovers in their cramp,From the fair dead who flush the seaThe bright-eyed worm on Davy's lamp,And from the planted womb the man of straw.

We summer boys in this four-winded spinning,Green of the seaweed's iron,Hold up the noisy sea and drop her birds,Pick the world's ball of wave and frothTo choke the deserts with her tides,And comb the county gardens for a wreath.



In spring we cross our foreheads with the holly,Heigh ho the blood and berry,And nail the merry squires to the trees;Here love's damp muscle dries and dies,Here break a kiss in no love's quarry.O see the poles of promise in the boys.

III

I see the boys of summer in their ruin.Man in his maggot's barren.And boys are full and foreign in the pouch.I am the man your father was.We are the sons of flint and pitch.O see the poles are kissing as they cross.

Dylan Thomas



I, In My Intricate Image

I

I, in my intricate image, stride on two levels,Forged in man's minerals, the brassy oratorLaying my ghost in metal,The scales of this twin world tread on the double,My half ghost in armour hold hard in death's corridor,To my man-iron sidle.

Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels,Bright as her spinning-wheels, the colic seasonWorked on a world of petals;She threads off the sap and needles, blood and bubbleCasts to the pine roots, raising man like a mountainOut of the naked entrail.

Beginning with doom in the ghost, and the springing marvels,Image of images, my metal phantomForcing forth through the harebell,My man of leaves and the bronze root, mortal, unmortal,I, in my fusion of rose and male motion,Create this twin miracle.

This is the fortune of manhood: the natural peril,A steeplejack tower, bonerailed and masterless,No death more natural;Thus the shadowless man or ox, and the pictured devil,In seizure of silence commit the dead nuisance.The natural parallel.

My images stalk the trees and the slant sap's tunnel,No tread more perilous, the green steps and spireMount on man's footfall,I with the wooden insect in the tree of nettles,In the glass bed of grapes with snail and flower,Hearing the weather fall.

Intricate manhood of ending, the invalid rivals,Voyaging clockwise off the symboled harbour,Finding the water final,On the consumptives' terrace taking their two farewells,Sail on the level, the departing adventure,To the sea-blown arrival.

II

They climb the country pinnacle,Twelve winds encounter by the white host at pasture,Corner the mounted meadows in the hill corral;They see the squirrel stumble,The haring snail go giddily round the flower,A quarrel of weathers and trees in the windy spiral.



As they dive, the dust settles,The cadaverous gravels, falls thick and steadily,The highroad of water where the seabear and mackerelTurn the long sea arterialTurning a petrol face blind to the enemyTurning the riderless dead by the channel wall.

(Death instrumental,Splitting the long eye open, and the spiral turnkey,Your corkscrew grave centred in navel and nipple,The neck of the nostril,Under the mask and the ether, they making bloodyThe tray of knives, the antiseptic funeral;

Bring out the black patrol,Your monstrous officers and the decaying army,The sexton sentinel, garrisoned under thistles,A cock-on-a-dunghillCrowing to Lazarus the morning is vanity,Dust be your saviour under the conjured soil.)

As they drown, the chime travels,Sweetly the diver's bell in the steeple of spindriftRings out the Dead Sea scale;And, clapped in water till the triton dangles,Strung by the flaxen whale-weed, from the hangman's raft,Hear they the salt glass breakers and the tongues of burial.

(Turn the sea-spindle lateral,The grooved land rotating, that the stylus of lightningDazzle this face of voices on the moon-turned table,Let the wax disk babbleShames and the damp dishonours, the relic scraping.These are your years' recorders. The circular world stands still.)

III

They suffer the undead water where the turtle nibbles,Come unto sea-stuck towers, at the fibre scaling,The flight of the carnal skullAnd the cell-stepped thimble;Suffer, my topsy-turvies, that a double angelSprout from the stony lockers like a tree on Aran.

Be by your one ghost pierced, his pointed ferrule,Brass and the bodiless image, on a stick of follyStar-set at Jacob's angle,Smoke hill and hophead's valley,And the five-fathomed Hamlet on his father's coralThrusting the tom-thumb vision up the iron mile.



Suffer the slash of vision by the fin-green stubble,Be by the ships' sea broken at the manstring anchoredThe stoved bones' voyage downwardIn the shipwreck of muscle;Give over, lovers, locking, and the seawax struggle,Love like a mist or fire through the bed of eels.

And in the pincers of the boiling circle,The sea and instrument, nicked in the locks of time,My great blood's iron singleIn the pouring town,I, in a wind on fire, from green Adam's cradle,No man more magical, clawed out the crocodile.

Man was the scales, the death birds on enamel,Tail, Nile, and snout, a saddler of the rushes,Time in the hourless housesShaking the sea-hatched skull,And, as for oils and ointments on the flying grail,All-hollowed man wept for his white apparel.

Man was Cadaver's masker, the harnessing mantle,Windily master of man was the rotten fathom,My ghost in his metal neptuneForged in man's mineral.This was the god of beginning in the intricate seawhirl,And my images roared and rose on heaven's hill.

Dylan Thomas



If I Were Tickled By the Rub of Love

If I were tickled by the rub of love,A rooking girl who stole me for her side,Broke through her straws, breaking my bandaged string,If the red tickle as the cattle calveStill set to scratch a laughter from my lung,I would not fear the apple nor the floodNor the bad blood of spring.

Shall it be male or female? say the cells,And drop the plum like fire from the flesh.If I were tickled by the hatching hair,The winging bone that sprouted in the heels,The itch of man upon the baby's thigh,I would not fear the gallows nor the axeNor the crossed sticks of war.

Shall it be male or female? say the fingersThat chalk the walls with greet girls and their men.I would not fear the muscling-in of loveIf I were tickled by the urchin hungersRehearsing heat upon a raw-edged nerve.I would not fear the devil in the loinNor the outspoken grave.

If I were tickled by the lovers' rubThat wipes away not crow's-foot nor the lockOf sick old manhood on the fallen jaws,Time and the crabs and the sweethearting cribWould leave me cold as butter for the fliesThe sea of scums could drown me as it brokeDead on the sweethearts' toes.

This world is half the devil's and my own,Daft with the drug that's smoking in a girlAnd curling round the bud that forks her eye.An old man's shank one-marrowed with my bone,And all the herrings smelling in the sea,I sit and watch the worm beneath my nailWearing the quick away.

And that's the rub, the only rub that tickles.The knobbly ape that swings along his sexFrom damp love-darkness and the nurse's twistCan never raise the midnight of a chuckle,Nor when he finds a beauty in the breastOf lover, mother, lovers, or his sixFeet in the rubbing dust.

And what's the rub? Death's feather on the nerve?Your mouth, my love, the thistle in the kiss?My Jack of Christ born thorny on the tree?The words of death are dryer than his stiff,



My wordy wounds are printed with your hair.I would be tickled by the rub that is:Man be my metaphor.

Dylan Thomas



In My Craft or Sullen Art

In my craft or sullen artExercised in the still nightWhen only the moon ragesAnd the lovers lie abedWith all their griefs in their armsI labour by singing lightNot for ambition or breadOr the strut and trade of charmsOn the ivory stagesBut for the common wagesOf their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apartFrom the raging moon I writeOn these spindrift pagesNor for the towering deadWith their nightingales and psalmsBut for the lovers, their armsRound the griefs of the ages,Who pay no praise or wagesNor heed my craft or art

Dylan Thomas



In the Beginning

In the beginning was the three-pointed star,One smile of light across the empty face,One bough of bone across the rooting air,The substance forked that marrowed the first sun,And, burning ciphers on the round of space,Heaven and hell mixed as they spun.

In the beginning was the pale signature,Three-syllabled and starry as the smile,And after came the imprints on the water,Stamp of the minted face upon the moon;The blood that touched the crosstree and the grailTouched the first cloud and left a sign.

In the beginning was the mounting fireThat set alight the weathers from a spark,A three-eyed, red-eyed spark, blunt as a flower,Life rose and spouted from the rolling seas,Burst in the roots, pumped from the earth and rockThe secret oils that drive the grass.

In the beginning was the word, the wordThat from the solid bases of the lightAbstracted all the letters of the void;And from the cloudy bases of the breathThe word flowed up, translating to the heartFirst characters of birth and death.

In the beginning was the secret brain.The brain was celled and soldered in the thoughtBefore the pitch was forking to a sun;Before the veins were shaking in their sieve,Blood shot and scattered to the winds of lightThe ribbed original of love.

Dylan Thomas



Incarnate Devil

Incarnate devil in a talking snake,The central plains of Asia in his garden,In shaping-time the circle stung awake,In shapes of sin forked out the bearded apple,And God walked there who was a fiddling wardenAnd played down pardon from the heavens' hill.

When we were strangers to the guided seas,A handmade moon half holy in a cloud,The wisemen tell me that the garden godsTwined good and evil on an eastern tree;And when the moon rose windily it wasBlack as the beast and paler than the cross.

We in our Eden knew the secret guardianIn sacred waters that no frost could harden,And in the mighty mornings of the earth;Hell in a horn of sulphur and the cloven myth,All heaven in the midnight of the sun,A serpent fiddled in the shaping-time.

Dylan Thomas



January 1939

Because the pleasure-bird whistles after the hot wires,Shall the blind horse sing sweeter?Convenient bird and beast lie lodged to sufferThe supper and knives of a mood.In the sniffed and poured snow on the tip of the tongue of the yearThat clouts the spittle like bubbles with broken rooms,An enamoured man alone by the twigs of his eyes, two fires,Camped in the drug-white shower of nerves and food,Savours the lick of the times through a deadly wood of hairIn a wind that plucked a goose,Nor ever, as the wild tongue breaks its tombs,Rounds to look at the red, wagged root.Because there stands, one story out of the bum city,That frozen wife whose juices drift like a fixed seaSecretly in statuary,Shall I, struck on the hot and rocking street,Not spin to stare at an old yearToppling and burning in the muddle of towers and galleriesLike the mauled pictures of boys?The salt person and blasted placeI furnish with the meat of a fable.If the dead starve, their stomachs turn to tumbleAn upright man in the antipodesOr spray-based and rock-chested sea:Over the past table I repeat this present grace.

Dylan Thomas



Lament

When I was a windy boy and a bitAnd the black spit of the chapel fold,(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of women),I tiptoed shy in the gooseberry wood,The rude owl cried like a tell-tale tit,I skipped in a blush as the big girls rolledNine-pin down on donkey's common,And on seesaw sunday nights I wooedWhoever I would with my wicked eyes,The whole of the moon I could love and leaveAll the green leaved little weddings' wivesIn the coal black bush and let them grieve.

When I was a gusty man and a halfAnd the black beast of the beetles' pews(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of bitches),Not a boy and a bit in the wick-Dipping moon and drunk as a new dropped calf,I whistled all night in the twisted flues,Midwives grew in the midnight ditches,And the sizzling sheets of the town cried, Quick!-Whenever I dove in a breast high shoal,Wherever I ramped in the clover quilts,Whatsoever I did in the coal-Black night, I left my quivering prints.

When I was a man you could call a manAnd the black cross of the holy house,(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of welcome),Brandy and ripe in my bright, bass prime,No springtailed tom in the red hot townWith every simmering woman his mouseBut a hillocky bull in the swelterOf summer come in his great good timeTo the sultry, biding herds, I said,Oh, time enough when the blood runs cold,And I lie down but to sleep in bed,For my sulking, skulking, coal black soul!

When I was half the man I wasAnd serve me right as the preachers warn,(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of downfall),No flailing calf or cat in a flameOr hickory bull in milky grassBut a black sheep with a crumpled horn,At last the soul from its foul mouseholeSlunk pouting out when the limp time came;And I gave my soul a blind, slashed eye,Gristle and rind, and a roarers' life,And I shoved it into the coal black skyTo find a woman's soul for a wife.



Now I am a man no more no moreAnd a black reward for a roaring life,(Sighed the old ram rod, dying of strangers),Tidy and cursed in my dove cooed roomI lie down thin and hear the good bells jaw--For, oh, my soul found a sunday wifeIn the coal black sky and she bore angels!Harpies around me out of her womb!Chastity prays for me, piety sings,Innocence sweetens my last black breath,Modesty hides my thighs in her wings,And all the deadly virtues plague my death!

Dylan Thomas



Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed

Lie still, sleep becalmed, sufferer with the woundIn the throat, burning and turning. All night afloatOn the silent sea we have heard the soundThat came from the wound wrapped in the salt sheet.

Under the mile off moon we trembled listeningTo the sea sound flowing like blood from the loud woundAnd when the salt sheet broke in a storm of singingThe voices of all the drowned swam on the wind.

Open a pathway through the slow sad sail,Throw wide to the wind the gates of the wandering boatFor my voyage to begin to the end of my wound,We heard the sea sound sing, we saw the salt sheet tell.Lie still, sleep becalmed, hide the mouth in the throat,Or we shall obey, and ride with you through the drowned.

Dylan Thomas



Light breaks where no sun shines

Light breaks where no sun shines;Where no sea runs, the waters of the heartPush in their tides;And, broken ghosts with glowworms in their heads,The things of lightFile through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.

A candle in the thighsWarms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age;Where no seed stirs,The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,Bright as a fig;Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.

Dawn breaks behind the eyes;From poles of skull and toe the windy bloodSlides like a sea;Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the skySpout to the rodDivining in a smile the oil of tears.

Night in the sockets rounds,Like some pitch moon, the limit of the globes;Day lights the bone;Where no cold is, the skinning gales unpinThe winter's robes;The film of spring is hanging from the lids.

Light breaks on secret lots,On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;When logics die,The secret of the soil grows through the eye,And blood jumps in the sun;Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.

Dylan Thomas



Love In the Asylum

A stranger has comeTo share my room in the house not right in the head,A girl mad as birds

Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.Strait in the mazed bedShe deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds

Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room,At large as the dead,Or rides the imagined oceans of the male wards.

She has come possessedWho admits the delusive light through the bouncing wall,Possessed by the skies

She sleeps in the narrow trough yet she walks the dustYet raves at her willOn the madhouse boards worn thin by my walking tears.

And taken by light in her arms at long and dear lastI may without failSuffer the first vision that set fire to the stars.

Dylan Thomas



My Hero Bares His Nerves

My hero bares his nerves along my wristThat rules from wrist to shoulder,Unpacks the head that, like a sleepy ghost,Leans on my mortal ruler,The proud spine spurning turn and twist.

And these poor nerves so wired to the skullAche on the lovelorn paperI hug to love with my unruly scrawlThat utters all love hungerAnd tells the page the empty ill.

My hero bares my side and sees his heartTread; like a naked Venus,The beach of flesh, and wind her bloodred plait;Stripping my loin of promise,He promises a secret heat.

He holds the wire from this box of nervesPraising the mortal errorOf birth and death, the two sad knaves of thieves,And the hunger's emperor;He pulls that chain, the cistern moves.

Dylan Thomas



My World Is Pyramid

I

Half of the fellow father as he doublesHis sea-sucked Adam in the hollow hulk,Half of the fellow mother as she dabblesTo-morrow's diver in her horny milk,Bisected shadows on the thunder's boneBolt for the salt unborn.

The fellow half was frozen as it bubbledCorrosive spring out of the iceberg's crop,The fellow seed and shadow as it babbledThe swing of milk was tufted in the pap,For half of love was planted in the lost,And the unplanted ghost.

The broken halves are fellowed in a cripple,The crutch that marrow taps upon their sleep,Limp in the street of sea, among the rabbleOf tide-tongued heads and bladders in the deep,And stake the sleepers in the savage graveThat the vampire laugh.

The patchwork halves were cloven as they scuddedThe wild pigs' wood, and slime upon the trees,Sucking the dark, kissed on the cyanide,And loosed the braiding adders from their hairs,Rotating halves are horning as they drillThe arterial angel.

What colour is glory? death's feather? trembleThe halves that pierce the pin's point in the air,And prick the thumb-stained heaven through the thimble.The ghost is dumb that stammered in the straw,The ghost that hatched his havoc as he flewBlinds their cloud-tracking eye.

II

My world is pyramid. The padded mummerWeeps on the desert ochre and the saltIncising summer.My Egypt's armour buckling in its sheet,I scrape through resin to a starry boneAnd a blood parhelion.

My world is cypress, and an English valley.I piece my flesh that rattled on the yardsRed in an Austrian volley.I hear, through dead men's drums, the riddled lads,Screwing their bowels from a hill of bones,



Cry Eloi to the guns.

My grave is watered by the crossing Jordan.The Arctic scut, and basin of the South,Drip on my dead house garden.Who seek me landward, marking in my mouthThe straws of Asia, lose me as I turnThrough the Atlantic corn.

The fellow halves that, cloven as they swivelOn casting tides, are tangled in the shells,Bearding the unborn devil,Bleed from my burning fork and smell my heels.The tongue's of heaven gossip as I glideBinding my angel's hood.

Who blows death's feather? What glory is colour?I blow the stammel feather in the vein.The loin is glory in a working pallor.My clay unsuckled and my salt unborn,The secret child, I sift about the seaDry in the half-tracked thigh.

Dylan Thomas



Not From This Anger

Not from this anger, anticlimax afterRefusal struck her loin and the lame flowerBent like a beast to lap the singular floodsIn a land strapped by hungerShall she receive a bellyful of weedsAnd bear those tendril hands I touch acrossThe agonized, two seas.Behind my head a square of sky sags overThe circular smile tossed from lover to loverAnd the golden ball spins out of the skies;Not from this anger afterRefusal struck like a bell under waterShall her smile breed that mouth, behind the mirror,That burns along my eyes.

Dylan Thomas



Now

NowSay nay,Man dry man,Dry lover mineThe deadrock base and blow the flowered anchor,Should he, for centre sake, hop in the dust,Forsake, the fool, the hardiness of anger.

NowSay nay,Sir no say,Death to the yes,the yes to death, the yesman and the answer,Should he who split his children with a cureHave brotherless his sister on the handsaw.

NowSay nay,No say sirYea the dead stir,And this, nor this, is shade, the landed crow,He lying low with ruin in his ear,The cockrel's tide upcasting from the fire.

NowSay nay,So star fall,So the ball fail,So solve the mystic sun, the wife of light,The sun that leaps on petals through a nought,the come-a-cropper rider of the flower.

NowSay nayA fig forThe seal of fire,Death hairy-heeled and the tapped ghost in wood,We make me mystic as the arm of air,The two-a-vein, the foreskin, and the cloud.

Dylan Thomas



O Make Me A Mask

O make me a mask and a wall to shut from your spiesOf the sharp, enamelled eyes and the spectacled clawsRape and rebellion in the nurseries of my face,Gag of dumbstruck tree to block from bare enemiesThe bayonet tongue in this undefended prayerpiece,The present mouth, and the sweetly blown trumpet of lies,Shaped in old armour and oak the countenance of a dunceTo shield the glistening brain and blunt the examiners,And a tear-stained widower grief drooped from the lashesTo veil belladonna and let the dry eyes perceiveOthers betray the lamenting lies of their lossesBy the curve of the nude mouth or the laugh up the sleeve.

Submitted by Venus

Dylan Thomas



On a Wedding Anniversary

The sky is torn acrossThis ragged anniversary of twoWho moved for three years in tuneDown the long walks of their vows.

Now their love lies a lossAnd Love and his patients roar on a chain;From every tune or craterCarrying cloud, Death strikes their house.

Too late in the wrong rainThey come together whom their love parted:The windows pour into their heartAnd the doors burn in their brain.

Dylan Thomas



On No Work of Words

On no work of words now for three lean months in thebloodyBelly of the rich year and the big purse of my bodyI bitterly take to task my poverty and craft:

To take to give is all, return what is hungrily givenPuffing the pounds of manna up through the dew to heaven,The lovely gift of the gab bangs back on a blind shaft.

To lift to leave from treasures of man is pleasing deathThat will rake at last all currencies of the marked breathAnd count the taken, forsaken mysteries in a bad dark.

To surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice.Ancient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seasIf I take to burn or return this world which is each man'swork.

Dylan Thomas



Once It Was the Colour of Saying

Once it was the colour of sayingSoaked my table the uglier side of a hillWith a capsized field where a school sat stillAnd a black and white patch of girls grew playing;The gentle seaslides of saying I must undoThat all the charmingly drowned arise to cockcrow and kill.When I whistled with mitching boys through a reservoir parkWhere at night we stoned the cold and cuckooLovers in the dirt of their leafy beds,The shade of their trees was a word of many shadesAnd a lamp of lightning for the poor in the dark;Now my saying shall be my undoing,And every stone I wind off like a reel.

Dylan Thomas



Our Eunuch Dreams

I

Our eunuch dreams, all seedless in the light,Of light and love the tempers of the heart,Whack their boys' limbs,And, winding-footed in their shawl and sheet,Groom the dark brides, the widows of the nightFold in their arms.

The shades of girls, all flavoured from their shrouds,When sunlight goes are sundered from the worm,The bones of men, the broken in their beds,By midnight pulleys that unhouse the tomb.

II

In this our age the gunman and his mollTwo one-dimensional ghosts, love on a reel,Strange to our solid eye,And speak their midnight nothings as they swell;When cameras shut they hurry to their holedown in the yard of day.

They dance between their arclamps and our skull,Impose their shots, showing the nights away;We watch the show of shadows kiss or killFlavoured of celluloid give love the lie.

III

Which is the world? Of our two sleepings, whichShall fall awake when cures and their itchRaise up this red-eyed earth?Pack off the shapes of daylight and their starch,The sunny gentlemen, the Welshing rich,Or drive the night-geared forth.

The photograph is married to the eye,Grafts on its bride one-sided skins of truth;The dream has sucked the sleeper of his faithThat shrouded men might marrow as they fly.

IV

This is the world; the lying likeness ofOur strips of stuff that tatter as we moveLoving and being loth;The dream that kicks the buried from their sackAnd lets their trash be honoured as the quick.This is the world. Have faith.

For we shall be a shouter like the cock,



Blowing the old dead back; our shots shall smackThe image from the plates;And we shall be fit fellows for a life,And who remains shall flower as they love,Praise to our faring hearts.

Dylan Thomas



Poem In October

It was my thirtieth year to heavenWoke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour woodAnd the mussel pooled and the heronPriested shoreThe morning beckonWith water praying and call of seagull and rookAnd the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wallMyself to set footThat secondIn the still sleeping town and set forth.

My birthday began with the water-Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my nameAbove the farms and the white horsesAnd I roseIn rainy autumnAnd walked abroad in a shower of all my days.High tide and the heron dived when I took the roadOver the borderAnd the gatesOf the town closed as the town awoke.

A springful of larks in a rollingCloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistlingBlackbirds and the sun of OctoberSummeryOn the hill's shoulder,Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenlyCome in the morning where I wandered and listenedTo the rain wringingWind blow coldIn the wood faraway under me.

Pale rain over the dwindling harbourAnd over the sea wet church the size of a snailWith its horns through mist and the castleBrown as owlsBut all the gardensOf spring and summer were blooming in the tall talesBeyond the border and under the lark full cloud.There could I marvelMy birthdayAway but the weather turned around.

It turned away from the blithe countryAnd down the other air and the blue altered skyStreamed again a wonder of summerWith applesPears and red currantsAnd I saw in the turning so clearly a child'sForgotten mornings when he walked with his motherThrough the parables



Of sun lightAnd the legends of the green chapels

And the twice told fields of infancyThat his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.These were the woods the river and seaWhere a boyIn the listeningSummertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joyTo the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.And the mysterySang aliveStill in the water and singingbirds.

And there could I marvel my birthdayAway but the weather turned around. And the trueJoy of the long dead child sang burningIn the sun.It was my thirtiethYear to heaven stood there then in the summer noonThough the town below lay leaved with October blood.O may my heart's truthStill be sungOn this high hill in a year's turning.

Dylan Thomas



Poem on his Birthday

In the mustardseed sun,By full tilt river and switchback seaWhere the cormorants scud,In his house on stilts high among beaksAnd palavers of birdsThis sandgrain day in the bent bay's graveHe celebrates and spurnsHis driftwood thirty-fifth wind turned age;Herons spire and spear.

Under and round him goFlounders, gulls, on their cold, dying trails,Doing what they are told,Curlews aloud in the congered wavesWork at their ways to death,And the rhymer in the long tongued room,Who tolls his birthday bell,Toesl towards the ambush of his wounds;Herons, stepple stemmed, bless.

In the thistledown fall,He sings towards anguish; finches flyIn the claw tracks of hawksOn a seizing sky; small fishes glideThrough wynds and shells of drownedShip towns to pastures of otters. HeIn his slant, racking houseAnd the hewn coils of his trade perceivesHerons walk in their shroud,

The livelong river's robeOf minnows wreathing around their prayer;And far at sea he knows,Who slaves to his crouched, eternal endUnder a serpent cloud,Dolphins dyive in their turnturtle dust,The rippled seals streak downTo kill and their own tide daubing bloodSlides good in the sleek mouth.

In a cavernous, swungWave's silence, wept white angelus knells.Thirty-five bells sing struckOn skull and scar where his lovews lie wrecked,Steered by the falling stars.And to-morrow weeps in a blind cageTerror will rage apartBefore chains break to a hammer flameAnd love unbolts the dark

And freely he goes lostIn the unknown, famous light of great



And fabulous, dear God.Dark is a way and light is a place,Heaven that never wasNor will be ever is alwas true,And, in that brambled void,Plenty as blackberries in the woodsThe dead grow for His joy.

There he might wander bareWith the spirits of the horseshoe bayOr the stars' seashore dead,Marrow of eagles, the roots of whalesAnd wishbones of wild geese,With blessed, unborn God and His Ghost,And every soul His priest,Gulled and chanter in youg Heaven's foldBe at cloud quaking peace,

But dark is a long way.He, on the earth of the night, aloneWith all the living, prays,Who knows the rocketing wind will blowThe bones out of the hills,And the scythed boulders bleed, and the lastRage shattered waters kickMasts and fishes to the still quick starts,Faithlessly unto Him

Who is the light of oldAnd air shaped Heaven where souls grow wildAs horses in the foam:Oh, let me midlife mourn by the shrinedAnd druid herons' vowsThe voyage to ruin I must run,Dawn ships clouted aground,Yet, though I cry with tumbledown tongue,Count my blessings aloud:

Four elements and fiveSenses, and man a spirit in loveThangling through this spun slimeTo his nimbus bell cool kingdom comeAnd the lost, moonshine domes,And the sea that hides his secret selvesDeep in its black, base bones,Lulling of spheres in the seashell flesh,And this last blessing most,

That the closer I moveTo death, one man through his sundered hulks,The louder the sun bloomsAnd the tusked, ramshackling sea exults;



And every wave of the wayAnd gale I tackle, the whole world then,With more triumphant faithThat ever was since the world was said,Spins its morning of praise,

I hear the bouncing hillsGrow larked and greener at berry brownFall and the dew larks singTaller this thuderclap spring, and howMore spanned with angles rideThe mansouled fiery islands! Oh,Holier then their eyes,And my shining men no more aloneAs I sail out to die

Dylan Thomas



Prologue

This day winding down nowAt God speeded summer's endIn the torrent salmon sun,In my seashaken houseOn a breakneck of rocksTangled with chirrup and fruit,Froth, flute, fin, and quillAt a wood's dancing hoof,By scummed, starfish sandsWith their fishwife crossGulls, pipers, cockles, and snails,Out there, crow black, menTackled with clouds, who kneelTo the sunset nets,Geese nearly in heaven, boysStabbing, and herons, and shellsThat speak seven seas,Eternal waters awayFrom the cities of nineDays' night whose towers will catchIn the religious windLike stalks of tall, dry straw,At poor peace I singTo you strangers (though songIs a burning and crested act,The fire of birds inThe world's turning wood,For my swan, splay sounds),Out of these seathumbed leavesThat will fly and fallLike leaves of trees and as soonCrumble and undieInto the dogdayed night.Seaward the salmon, sucked sun slips,And the dumb swans drub blueMy dabbed bay's dusk, as I hackThis rumpus of shapesFor you to knowHow I, a spining man,Glory also this star, birdRoared, sea born, man torn, blood blest.Hark: I trumpet the place,From fish to jumping hill! Look:I build my bellowing arkTo the best of my loveAs the flood begins,Out of the fountainheadOf fear, rage read, manalive,Molten and mountainous to streamOver the wound asleepSheep white hollow farms



To Wales in my arms.Hoo, there, in castle keep,You king singsong owls, who moonbeamThe flickering runs and diveThe dingle furred deer dead!Huloo, on plumbed bryns,O my ruffled ring dovein the hooting, nearly darkWith Welsh and reverent rook,Coo rooning the woods' praise,who moons her blue notes from her nestDown to the curlew herd!Ho, hullaballoing clanAgape, with woeIn your beaks, on the gabbing capes!Heigh, on horseback hill, jackWhisking hare! whoHears, there, this fox light, my flood ship'sClangour as I hew and smite(A clash of anvils for myHubbub and fiddle, this tuneOn a toungued puffball)But animals thick as theivesOn God's rough tumbling grounds(Hail to His beasthood!).Beasts who sleep good and thin,Hist, in hogback woods! The haystackedHollow farms in a throngOf waters cluck and cling,And barnroofs cockcrow war!O kingdom of neighbors finnedFelled and quilled, flash to my patchWork ark and the moonshineDrinking Noah of the bay,With pelt, and scale, and fleece:Only the drowned deep bellsOf sheep and churches noisePoor peace as the sun setsAnd dark shoals every holy field.We will ride out alone then,Under the stars of Wales,Cry, multitudes of arks! AcrossThe water lidded lands,Manned with their loves they'll moveLike wooden islands, hill to hill.Hulloo, my prowed dove with a flute!Ahoy, old, sea-legged fox,Tom tit and Dai mouse!My ark sings in the sunAt God speeded summer's endAnd the flood flowers now.



Dylan Thomas



Should Lanterns Shine

Should lanterns shine, the holy face,Caught in an octagon of unaccustomed light,Would wither up, an any boy of loveLook twice before he fell from grace.The features in their private darkAre formed of flesh, but let the false day comeAnd from her lips the faded pigments fall,The mummy cloths expose an ancient breast.

I have been told to reason by the heart,But heart, like head, leads helplessly;I have been told to reason by the pulse,And, when it quickens, alter the actions' paceTill field and roof lie level and the sameSo fast I move defying time, the quiet gentlemanWhose beard wags in Egyptian wind.

I have heard may years of telling,And many years should see some change.

The ball I threw while playing in the parkHas not yet reached the ground.

Dylan Thomas



Sometimes the Sky's Too Bright

Sometimes the sky's too bright,Or has too many clouds or birds,And far away's too sharp a sunTo nourish thinking of him.Why is my hand too bluntTo cut in front of meMy horrid images for me,Of over-fruitful smiles,The weightless touching of the lipI wish to knowI cannot lift, but can,The creature with the angel's faceWho tells me hurt,And sees my body goDown into misery?No stopping. Put the smileWhere tears have come to dry.The angel's hurt is left;His telling burns.

Sometimes a woman's heart has salt,Or too much blood;I tear her breast,And see the blood is mine,Flowing from her, but mine,And then I thinkPerhaps the sky's too bright;And watch my hand,But do not follow it,And feel the pain it gives,But do not ache.

Dylan Thomas



The Conversation of Prayer

The conversation of prayers about to be saidBy the child going to bed and the man on the stairsWho climbs to his dying love in her high room,The one not caring to whom in his sleep he will moveAnd the other full of tears that she will be dead,

Turns in the dark on the sound they know will ariseInto the answering skies from the green ground,From the man on the stairs and the child by his bed.The sound about to be said in the two prayersFor the sleep in a safe land and the love who dies

Will be the same grief flying. Whom shall they calm?Shall the child sleep unharmed or the man be crying?The conversation of prayers about to be saidTurns on the quick and the dead, and the man on the stairTo-night shall find no dying but alive and warm

In the fire of his care his love in the high room.And the child not caring to whom he climbs his prayerShall drown in a grief as deep as his made grave,And mark the dark eyed wave, through the eyes of sleep,Dragging him up the stairs to one who lies dead.

Dylan Thomas



The Force that Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower

The force that through the green fuse drives the flowerDrives my green age; that blasts the roots of treesIs my destroyer.And I am dumb to tell the crooked roseMy youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

The force that drives the water through the rocksDrives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streamsTurns mine to wax.And I am dumb to mouth unto my veinsHow at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.

The hand that whirls the water in the poolStirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing windHauls my shroud sail.And I am dumb to tell the hanging manHow of my clay is made the hangman's lime.

The lips of time leech to the fountain head;Love drips and gathers, but the fallen bloodShall calm her sores.And I am dumb to tell a weather's windHow time has ticked a heaven round the stars.

And I am dumb to tell the lover's tombHow at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

Dylan Thomas



The Hand That Signed the Paper

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;These five kings did a king to death.

The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,The finger joints are cramped with chalk;A goose's quill has put an end to murderThat put an end to talk.

The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,And famine grew, and locusts came;Great is the hand that holds dominion overMan by a scribbled name.

The five kings count the dead but do not softenThe crusted wound nor pat the brow;A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;Hands have no tears to flow.

Dylan Thomas



The Seed-At-Zero

The seed-at-zero shall not stormThat town of ghosts, the trodden womb,With her rampart to his tapping,No god-in-hero tumble downLike a tower on the townDumbly and divinely stumblingOver the manwaging line.

The seed-at-zero shall not stormThat town of ghosts, the manwaged tombWith her rampart to his tapping,No god-in-hero tumble downLike a tower on the townDumbly and divinely leapingOver the warbearing line.

Through the rampart of the skyShall the star-flanked seed be riddled,Manna for the rumbling ground,Quickening for the riddled sea;Settled on a virgin strongholdHe shall grapple with the guardAnd the keeper of the key.

May a humble village labourAnd a continent deny?A hemisphere may scold himAnd a green inch be his bearer;Let the hero seed find harbour,Seaports by a drunken shoreHave their thirsty sailors hide him.

May be a humble planet labourAnd a continent deny?A village green may scold himAnd a high sphere be his bearer;Let the hero seed find harbour,Seaports by a thirsty shoreHave their drunken sailors hide him.

Man-in-seed, in seed-at-zero,From the foreign fields of space,Shall not thunder on the townWith a star-flanked garrison,Nor the cannons of his kingdomShall the hero-in-tomorrowRange on the sky-scraping place.

Man-in-seed, in seed-at-zero,From the star-flanked fields of space,Thunders on the foreign townWith a sand-bagged garrison,



Nor the cannons of his kingdomShall the hero-in-to-morrowRange from the grave-groping place.

Dylan Thomas



Then Was My Neophyte

Then was my neophyte,Child in white blood bent on its kneesUnder the bell of rocks,Ducked in the twelve, disciple seasThe winder of the water-clocksCalls a green day and night.My sea hermaphrodite,Snail of man in His ship of firesThat burn the bitten decks,Knew all His horrible desiresThe climber of the water sexCalls the green rock of light.

Who in these labyrinths,This tidethread and the lane of scales,Twine in a moon-blown shell,Escapes to the flat cities' sailsFurled on the fishes' house and hell,Nor falls to His green myths?Stretch the salt photographs,The landscape grief, love in His oilsMirror from man to whaleThat the green child see like a grailThrough veil and fin and fire and coilTime on the canvas paths.

He films my vanity.Shot in the wind, by tilted arcs,Over the water comeChildren from homes and children's parksWho speak on a finger and thumb,And the masked, headless boy.His reels and mysteryThe winder of the clockwise sceneWound like a ball of lakesThen threw on that tide-hoisted screenLove's image till my heartbone breaksBy a dramatic sea.

Who kills my history?The year-hedged row is lame with flint,Blunt scythe and water blade.'Who could snap off the shapeless printFrom your to-morrow-treading shadeWith oracle for eye?'Time kills me terribly.'Time shall not murder you,' He said,'Nor the green nought be hurt;Who could hack out your unsucked heart,O green and unborn and undead?'I saw time murder me.



Dylan Thomas



There Was a Saviour

There was a saviourRarer than radium,Commoner than water, crueller than truth;Children kept from the sunAssembled at his tongueTo hear the golden note turn in a groove,Prisoners of wishes locked their eyesIn the jails and studies of his keyless smiles.

The voice of children saysFrom a lost wildernessThere was calm to be done in his safe unrest,When hindering man hurtMan, animal, or birdWe hid our fears in that murdering breath,Silence, silence to do, when earth grew loud,In lairs and asylums of the tremendous shout.

There was glory to hearIn the churches of his tears,Under his downy arm you sighed as he struck,O you who could not cryOn to the ground when a man diedPut a tear for joy in the unearthly floodAnd laid your cheek against a cloud-formed shell:Now in the dark there is only yourself and myself.

Two proud, blacked brothers cry,Winter-locked side by side,To this inhospitable hollow year,O we who could not stirOne lean sigh when we heardGreed on man beating near and fire neighbourBut wailed and nested in the sky-blue wallNow break a giant tear for the little known fall,

For the drooping of homesThat did not nurse our bones,Brave deaths of only ones but never found,Now see, alone in us,Our own true strangers' dustRide through the doors of our unentered house.Exiled in us we arouse the soft,Unclenched, armless, silk and rough love that breaks all rocks.

Dylan Thomas



This Side of the Truth

(for Llewelyn)

This side of the truth,You may not see, my son,King of your blue eyesIn the blinding country of youth,That all is undone,Under the unminding skies,Of innocence and guiltBefore you move to makeOne gesture of the heart or head,Is gathered and spiltInto the winding darkLike the dust of the dead.

Good and bad, two waysOf moving about your deathBy the grinding sea,King of your heart in the blind days,Blow away like breath,Go crying through you and meAnd the souls of all menInto the innocentDark, and the guilty dark, and goodDeath, and bad death, and thenIn the last elementFly like the stars' blood

Like the sun's tears,Like the moon's seed, rubbishAnd fire, the flying rantOf the sky, king of your six years.And the wicked wish,Down the beginning of plantsAnd animals and birds,Water and Light, the earth and sky,Is cast before you move,And all your deeds and words,Each truth, each lie,Die in unjudging love.

Dylan Thomas



To-Day, This Insect

To-day, this insect, and the world I breathe,Now that my symbols have outelbowed space,Time at the city spectacles, and halfThe dear, daft time I take to nudge the sentence,In trust and tale I have divided sense,Slapped down the guillotine, the blood-red doubleOf head and tail made witnesses to thisMurder of Eden and green genesis.

The insect certain is the plague of fables.

This story's monster has a serpent caul,Blind in the coil scrams round the blazing outline,Measures his own length on the garden wallAnd breaks his shell in the last shocked beginning;A crocodile before the chrysalis,Before the fall from love the flying heartbone,Winged like a sabbath ass this children's pieceUncredited blows Jericho on Eden.

The insect fable is the certain promise.

Death: death of Hamlet and the nightmare madmen,An air-drawn windmill on a wooden horse,John's beast, Job's patience, and the fibs of vision,Greek in the Irish sea the ageless voice:'Adam I love, my madmen's love is endless,No tell-tale lover has an end more certain,All legends' sweethearts on a tree of stories,My cross of tales behind the fabulous curtain.'

Dylan Thomas



Twenty Four Years

Twenty-four years remind the tears of my eyes.(Bury the dead for fear that they walk to the grave in labour.)In the groin of the natural doorway I crouched like a tailorSewing a shroud for a journeyBy the light of the meat-eating sun.Dressed to die, the sensual strut begun,With my red veins full of money,In the final direction of the elementary townI advance as long as forever is.

Dylan Thomas



Twenty-Four Years

Twenty-four years remind the tears of my eyes.(Bury the dead for fear that they walk to the grave in labour.)In the groin of the natural doorway I crouched like a tailorSewing a shroud for a journeyBy the light of the meat-eating sun.Dressed to die, the sensual strut begun,With my red veins full of money,In the final direction of the elementary townI advance as long as forever is.

Dylan Thomas



Vision and Prayer

WhoAre youWho is bornIn the next roomSo loud to my ownThat I can hear the wombOpening and the dark runOver the ghost and the dropped sonBehind the wall thin as a wren's bone?In the birth bloody room unknownTo the burn and turn of timeAnd the heart print of manBows no baptismBut dark aloneBlessing onThe wildChild.

Dylan Thomas



Vision and Prayer [I]

Who Are you Who is born In the next room

So loud to my own That I can hear the womb Opening and the dark run Over the ghost and the dropped sonBehind the wall thin as a wren's bone? In the birth bloody room unknown To the burn and turn of time And the heart print of man

Bows no baptism But dark alone Blessing on The wild Child.

Dylan Thomas



Was There a Time

Was there a time when dancers with their fiddlesIn children's circuses could stay their troubles?There was a time they could cry over books,But time has sent its maggot on their track.Under the arc of the sky they are unsafe.What's never known is safest in this life.Under the skysigns they who have no armshave cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghostAlone's unhurt, so the blind man sees best.

Dylan Thomas



When All My Five and Country Senses See

When all my five and country senses see,The fingers will forget green thumbs and markHow, through the halfmoon's vegetable eye,Husk of young stars and handfull zodiac,Love in the frost is pared and wintered by,The whispering ears will watch love drummed awayDown breeze and shell to a discordant beach,And, lashed to syllables, the lynx tongue cryThat her fond wounds are mended bitterly.My nostrils see her breath burn like a bush.

My one and noble heart has witnessesIn all love's countries, that will grope awake;And when blind sleep drops on the spying senses,The heart is sensual, though five eyes break.

Dylan Thomas



When Once the Twilight Locks No Longer

When once the twilight locks no longerLocked in the long worm of my fingerNor damned the sea that sped about my fist,The mouth of time sucked, like a sponge,The milky acid on each hinge,And swallowed dry the waters of the breast.

When the galactic sea was suckedAnd all the dry seabed unlocked,I sent my creature scouting on the globe,That globe itself of hair and boneThat, sewn to me by nerve and brain,Had stringed my flask of matter to his rib.

My fuses are timed to charge his heart,He blew like powder to the lightAnd held a little sabbath with the sun,But when the stars, assuming shape,Drew in his eyes the straws of sleepHe drowned his father's magics in a dream.

All issue armoured, of the grave,The redhaired cancer still alive,The cataracted eyes that filmed their cloth;Some dead undid their bushy jaws,And bags of blood let out their flies;He had by heart the Christ-cross-row of death.

Sleep navigates the tides of time;The dry Sargasso of the tombGives up its dead to such a working sea;And sleep rolls mute above the bedsWhere fishes' food is fed the shadesWho periscope through flowers to the sky.

When once the twilight screws were turned,And mother milk was stiff as sand,I sent my own ambassador to light;By trick or chance he fell asleepAnd conjured up a carcass shapeTo rob me of my fluids in his heart.

Awake, my sleeper, to the sun,A worker in the morning town,And leave the poppied pickthank where he lies;The fences of the light are down,All but the briskest riders thrownAnd worlds hang on the trees.

Dylan Thomas



When, Like a Running Grave

When, like a running grave, time tracks you down,Your calm and cuddled is a scythe of hairs,Love in her gear is slowly through the house,Up naked stairs, a turtle in a hearse,Hauled to the dome,

Comes, like a scissors stalking, tailor age,Deliver me who timid in my tribe,Of love am barer than Cadaver's trapRobbed of the foxy tongue, his footed tapeOf the bone inch

Deliver me, my masters, head and heart,Heart of Cadaver's candle waxes thin,When blood, spade-handed, and the logic timeDrive children up like bruises to the thumb,From maid and head,

For, sunday faced, with dusters in my glove,Chaste and the chaser, man with the cockshut eye,I, that time's jacket or the coat of iceMay fail to fasten with a virgin oIn the straight grave,

Stride through Cadaver's country in my force,My pickbrain masters morsing on the stoneDespair of blood faith in the maiden's slime,Halt among eunuchs, and the nitric stainOn fork and face.

Time is a foolish fancy, time and fool.No, no, you lover skull, descending hammerDescends, my masters, on the entered honour.You hero skull, Cadaver in the hangarTells the stick, 'fail.'

Joy is no knocking nation, sir and madam,The cancer's fashion, or the summer featherLit on the cuddled tree, the cross of fever,Not city tar and subway bored to fosterMan through macadam.

I dump the waxlights in your tower dome.Joy is the knock of dust, Cadaver's shootOf bud of Adam through his boxy shift,Love's twilit nation and the skull of state,Sir, is your doom.

Everything ends, the tower ending and,(Have with the house of wind), the leaning scene,Ball of the foot depending from the sun,(Give, summer, over), the cemented skin,



The actions' end.

All, men my madmen, the unwholesome windWith whistler's cough contages, time on trackShapes in a cinder death; love for his trick,Happy Cadaver's hunger as you takeThe kissproof world.

Dylan Thomas



Where Once the Waters of Your Face

Where once the waters of your faceSpun to my screws, your dry ghost blows,The dead turns up its eye;Where once the mermen through your icePushed up their hair, the dry wind steersThrough salt and root and roe.

Where once your green knots sank their spliceInto the tided cord, there goesThe green unraveller,His scissors oiled, his knife hung looseTo cut the channels at their sourceAnd lay the wet fruits low.

Invisible, your clocking tidesBreak on the lovebeds of the weeds;The weed of love's left dry;There round about your stones the shadesOf children go who, from their voids,Cry to the dolphined sea.

Dry as a tomb, your coloured lidsShall not be latched while magic glidesSage on the earth and sky;There shall be corals in your bedsThere shall be serpents in your tides,Till all our sea-faiths die.

Dylan Thomas


Dylan Thomas - Collected Poems

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Transcript of Dylan Thomas - Collected Poems